Content for teachers and students about robotics in our world. Is robotics the Perfect Platform for 21st Century Learning? Read on!.. Would you like your student robotics activities presented here? Leave a comment or email me. And check out Robotics for Teachers PODCAST @ http://www.roboticsforteachers.com/

Wednesday, June 15, 2016

"Can a wall-climbing robot teach your kid to code?

Last month, a few hand-sized, hexagonal robots took over a third-grade
classroom in Southborough, Massachusetts. They climbed a whiteboard and
drew all over it while flashing multicolored LEDs and chirping
musically. All the while, they were teaching kids to code.

Meet Root — a robot being beta-tested by its creators at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. The Wyss team hopes Root will soon roll into the gap
between the growing enthusiasm for K-12 computer science and the lack
of qualified teachers. With Root’s help, they claim, any teacher can
become a computer

“Root’s job is to celebrate the code you create by bringing it to
life,” said Justin Werfel, a senior research scientist at Wyss. Root
magnetically clings to whiteboards (most of which are metal-backed)
where it acts out programs that students compose on iPads that are
wirelessly linked to the robot.Unlike other educational robots — such as Bee-Bots, Dash & Dot,
and Lego Mindstorms — that are geared to a specific age range, Root is
meant to span from pre-kindergarten to college. With black sides and a
plain white top crossed with LEDs, Root is deliberately un-cuddly and
unadorned — a highly functional, sensor-packed box that can draw with a
marker inserted in its middle.

Root’s sensors can spot and react to what you’ve drawn on the
whiteboard — following a black line, for instance, or stopping at a red
one.

The robot can also lift up and put down the marker to draw as it
moves.
Level two of Square is also block-based, but it introduces more text
and numeric variables for things like movement commands. Level three is
text-based, JavaScript code. Students can toggle between the levels to
translate their block commands into text code or vice versa..."

Friday, June 10, 2016

SEE IT: Robot that will fold, press and ‘perfume’ your laundry set to invade households in 2018

A space-age appliance straight out of “The Jetsons” could lighten the load of the laundry-weary masses.
FoldiMate, a California-based startup is looking to sell a solution to a first world problem for a first world price.

The robot, slated to cost between $700 to $850, has the sole purpose of
folding laundry twice as fast as the average human could.

Additionally it is able to “de-wrinkle” pants and dress shirts with
steam and it also “perfumes” them as it goes, according to the
commercial.

A space-age appliance straight out of “The Jetsons” could lighten the load of the laundry-weary masses.
FoldiMate, a California-based startup is looking to sell a solution to a first world problem for a first world price.

FoldiMate takes ten seconds to fold, steam and perfume your laundry.

Apparently folding laundry is a tedious enough task that the FoldiMate
has started to generate interest among those who truly despise basic
household chores.
Its commercial on YouTube, posted less than a month ago, has nearly 2 million views and almost 2,000 likes.

According to FoldiMate’s website, more than 65,000 people have registered to be notified when preorders begin.

When he was collecting cardboard boxes, Jasuel Rivera’s grandmother
thought he was just making a mess. And like any Dominican matriarch she
asked him about “ese reguero.” Jasuel, 12, tinkered with the boxes until
eventually he was building robotic toys powered by things like
syringes.

According to Zona5, Jasuel’s family is not able to buy him
the toys he wants, so he took to the Internet and books to learn how to
create his own. Now, he has 12, including a functional semi truck,
trailer, and other equipment you might find at a construction site that
are all made out of recycled materials. “I didn’t have money to buy one,
but I saw one like this on the Internet, so I made my own,” he said. “I
liked it, so I kept on doing it.”

He has been very influenced by mathematician Blaise Pascal’s law
on fluid mechanics, which he can better explain than me. Pascal’s law
led him to trying different liquids to power his toys. In the end, he
said water was the best choice."

Sunday, June 5, 2016

Nice video this one. I've never had the opportunity to interview this gentleman, but his ideas are very similar to those that are detailed in my book, Getting Started with LEGO Robotics!

Click on book cover for information

Getting Started with LEGO Robotics. Anyone who
works with kids can do LEGO Robotics, a rich and highly motivating
platform for important STEM Learning! (surprisingly affordable, too)
This books explains it all!

Thursday, June 2, 2016

Robot Sumo Event Featured in Scientific American, Vice & Ars Technica

Scoring a tech media hat-trick, The Cooper Union's 2016 Robot Sumo event has been featured by Scientific American, Vice and Ars Technica. The annual competition takes place during the End of Year Show opening night. The students of Professor Brian Cusack's
mechatronics class must build their own robots that are able to
autonomously stay in the ring against their opponents. The winner is
usually, “the one that malfunctions the least," Prof. Cusack is quoted
as saying.

Students, especially girls, benefit from using robots to learn math

American Canyon high school and middle school students have so
enjoyed working with robotics that they sometimes don’t realize that
they’re also learning mathematics in the process.

This kind of
learning has delighted educators and parents, particularly with respect
to young girls, who often struggle or lose interest in math and science
once they reach middle school.

“What kid is not going to like
playing with robotics,” said American Canyon Middle School Principal Dan
Scudero. “They don’t always realize they’re learning math at the same
time initially. Later on they realize, ‘Oh, I’m learning math,’ and
having fun, which is what it should be.”

Scudero’s school originated the robotics program in American
Canyon four years ago. There, math teacher Tammy Lee first introduced
sixth graders to small modular robots called Linkbots in one of her
classes.
The addition of robotics excited many students at ACMS,
including sophomore Sara Jahangiri and freshman Katrina Cole, both of
whom are now at American Canyon High School.

“It’s just a great
experience,” said Jahangiri. “The main reason I do it is because of the
team. I play sports but robotics is always a team I can depend on. We
work well together, and we learn together.”
Cole said she enjoyed
math before working with Linkbots, but also admitted the subject was
challenging for her at times when she was younger.

But “when we were able to incorporate robots in it, it helped you pick up on the topics quicker” in math classes, she said.

Her mother, Melissa Cole, has seen nothing but good things come of her daughter’s participation in robotics.
“She
has grown with it [the program],” said Melissa Cole outside ACHS
teacher Scott Marsden’s classroom, where high school robotics has
steadily grown the past two years.

When Katrina was in seventh
grade and preparing to attend UC Davis’ C-STEM Day, a type of Super Bowl
for Linkbot students, her mother remarked how good the activity was for
her math skills.

Katrina insisted to her mother that she wasn’t employing math.

“It was so much fun for her,” said mom, echoing Principal Scudero’s words, “she didn’t even realize she was using math.”

“When
she talks about it [robotics], she’s speaking a whole other language,”
her mother added. “She speaks code, and I don’t understand one bit of
it.”

The program has been good for Katrina in other ways.

“She
has become a lot more confident in it [robotics],” Melissa Cole said.
“As the years have progressed, she’s understanding what she is doing and
knows how to resolve a problem when she sees it on the board.”
“This program has definitely kept her more involved in math,” she added.

That’s precisely what Scudaro wants to hear.

“You can see it in the research over and over again,”
said Scudero. “Girls fall out of math at the middle school level, and
science too.”

“It’s a weird societal thing we gotta break,” he
added. “They’re just becoming teenagers, they’re trying to figure out
who they are, and if you look at the media, until recently there haven’t
been a lot of positive images of women in mathematical fields or
scientific fields.”

The goal is to instill in all young girls that “it’s OK to be a brainiac,” he said. “It’s a good thing.”
That
feeling is shared by officials at the Center for Integrated Computing
and STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics] Education
at UC Davis, which has been pushing for K-12 schools to blend robotics
with math curriculum.

“Our goal is to get kids from first grade to twelfth interested in math and robotics,” said Assistant Director Calvin Chen.

Giving
students “something tangible, a robot they can play with,” motivates
them to learn the math and programming behind making the technology
operate.

“It’s not all abstract,” said Chen, referring to the traditional model of teaching math exclusively out of a textbook.

The
Center for Integrated Computing and STEM Education is also emphasizing
math/robotics for teen girls. It runs a summer camp at UC Davis for them
— one for boys is coming soon, too — and it has helped school districts
in Benicia and Mount Diablo start their own camps as well.

The
Center hosts the annual C-STEM Day competition, in which student teams
from high schools and middle schools throughout California spend an
entire day programming Linkbots.

American Canyon students have
made an impression at the competition, winning awards the last three
years, including an ACMS team that place first in the state in 2015.

“They
did really well,” said Chen about this year’s teams from ACHS and ACMS.
“They were by far the most represented [school] district at the event.”

“At
the awards ceremony they were doing cheers and chants,” Chen said.
“Everybody else was [claps his hands], you just heard clapping” from the
other schools.

But the American Canyon students behaved as if
they were at a football rally. “They were cheering AC!” said Chen. “It
was like a sports event.”

He said the enthusiasm “was good. I
think it motivated some of the other kids [from other districts]” to do
more next year, according to Chen.

Chen was complimentary of Lee
and Marsden for working so well together and building a “pipeline”
between the middle school and high school for robotics.

Marsden
agreed, saying: “The strength of our AC Robotics team, and what
distinguishes us from other schools is that we have a strong middle-high
school collaboration that allows students to transition from middle
school robotics to high school robotics.”

Click on book cover for information

Getting Started with LEGO Robotics. Anyone who works with kids can do LEGO Robotics, a rich and highly motivating platform for important STEM Learning! (surprisingly affordable, too) This books explains it all!